1. Is Spec Work Ever Okay?

Threadless is a popular t-shirt company who crowdsources its designs from user submissions. Chosen designs are awarded $2,500 with bonuses for reprints and a shot at a larger prize in a yearly "best-of" competition. But of course, the company might make a hundred times that in sales, which has led some to accuse it of basing its business on spec work.

Jake Nickell, CEO of Threadless, doesn't argue that he uses spec work, but he disagrees that what his company does is a bad thing. His argument is that Threadless submissions 1. Allow designers to keep their copyrights 2. Are an open process with no specifications (no brief) 3. Pay quite a bit. Most importantly, he says, people who submit to Threadless do it for enjoyment and not for the money.

I'm torn. On one hand, it doesn't answer the critics of spec work which argue for professional engagement-- that design is serious business which is not something to be farmed out on the cheap to amateurs. On the other, people who aren't designers like to make things and Threadless actually seems to give them a fair shake. I'm not sure what the breakdown is ethically. But if you're going to solicit spec work, I suppose there's a sea of people out there doing worse.

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Coding Horror posted what just so happened to be an interesting follow-up to my post from last Monday later last week. Their post, How Not to Advertise on the Internet, is about the in-browser Civilization-style game Evony.

Jeff collected a series of advertisements for the game, and displayed them in chronological order. I've collected them from him and done the same below.

He's insistent that "these are real ads that were served on the internet. This is not a parody." Take a look:

Ads for Evony, in chronological order.

These ads are a perfect example of someone succombing to Seth's shortcut to cash when times are tough, and Jeff's blog post is itself yet another case substantiating DLB's first axiom: Be good, because when you're not, the Internet will call you on it.

Developed by 2D Boy, a two-person team, World of Goo is a puzzle game with a simple mechanic—assembling minimal physics-simulated structures so your Goo-balls can exit the level, Lemmings-style. More than this, it has great production values (made with open source software!) and a lot of heart. If you’re in need of some fun, we encourage you to check out the demo.

Don’t just take our word for it. The critics totally dig the full game.

When you’re ready to take the plunge, you can purchase it on Steam (which we also like), or from WiiWare. ((I may go the Wii route over Christmas because I like waggle controls and it seems to be a bit more reasonably priced than the PC version ($15 vs. $20)))

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We talk a good game about restraint around here, often with regards to features or aesthetics. Restraint means to hold something back, to hold in those impulses for more, and eliminate excesses that might get in the way of user experience. But what about excessive customers?

It’s a problem we’d all like to have, right? But today, I’m going to pose a serious question: Are less customers better than more?

What started me thinking about this was my experience with the Dungeons & Dragons Facebook application. The game was minimalist, but addictive. So addictive, in fact, that the servers were slammed almost immediately.

Everything was going great. Then the server failed its saving roll...

All weekend long, my page requests kept coming back lost, but I persisted. It was annoying, but it didn’t keep me from leveling up my character. By Monday, the application had so much traffic that it was completely unresponsive and was taken offline.

When the servers recovered, the news came that the databases had crashed and everyone’s characters were lost. My halfling rogue was dead and no Resurrection spell could bring him back.

Now, I’ll put up with a lot for something that is free and fun, but after losing all my progress I decided I just didn’t want to play anymore. The spell was broken. They’d lost me for good.

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